Sugar Skull

It's here: The concluding volume in the epic trilogy that began with X'ed Out and The Hive, marking the completion of a true graphic novel milestone.

Strange, fantastical and largely terrifying… If you fancy escaping into a dystopian nightmare… then we can’t recommend Burns’ work highly enough.

My strong feeling is that this series is one of the most vividly drawn and painfully and honest expositions of male guilt I’ve ever read… I love Charles Burns…and I really adore these books.

Fans who return to the first two volumes will find even more resonance there now that the trilogy is complete.

Burns brings it all together in Sugar Skull. I don’t know which impressed me more – the slow build-up, over three books, to the revelation and knowledge that the final volume delivers.

The confidence with which Burns positions himself within the larger map of other writing and art is entirely earned.

The long strange trip of Doug reaches its mind-bending, heartbreaking end, but not before he is forced to deal with the lie he's been telling himself since the beginning. The fragments of the past collide with the reality of the present, nightmarish dreams evolve into an even more dreadful reality, and when you finally find out where all of this has been going, and what it means . . . well. I won't spoil it here, but it will make you go right back to page one of X'ed Out and read it all again with new eyes. 
 
Just like Doug.

X'ed Out

From the creator of the cult classic Black Hole, a graphic narrative that will delight and surpass the expectations of his fans.

Charles Burns's comics are fluid, smooth and as solidly built as a vintage TV set, but they shudder with the chill of the uncanny.

From the creator of the cult classic Black Hole, a graphic narrative that will delight and surpass the expectations of his fans. 
 
X'ed Out is most easily described as 'Hergé meets William S. Burroughs.' We are back in that spectral, surreal terrain that Burns has made his own - only now the seamless weaves of the erotic and horrifying is played out in parallel worlds of adolescent longing and dreamscape set in China.

Meet Doug, aspiring young artist. He's having a strange night. A weird buzzing noise on the other side of the wall has woken him up, and there across the room, next to a huge hole torn out of the bricks, sits his beloved cat Inky. Who died years ago. But that's no longer the case, as he slinks through the hole, beckoning Doug to follow. So he does. Now there's no turning back. What the heck is going on? To say much more would spoil the creepy, Burnsian fun, especially since - unlike Black Hole - X'ed Out has not been previously serialised anywhere and will have readers guessing at every unnervingly meticulous panel. 
 
Drawing inspiration from such diverse influences as Herge and William Burroughs, X'ed Out is an engrossing new comic book fever-dream, from a true master of the form at the height of his powers

Black Hole

It's here: Charles Burns' epic story of existential horror, over ten years in the making.

Many regard Black Hole as one of the greatest graphic novels, and it's not hard to see why. Burns's black-and-white strips are so cool, and his story - sex, drugs and teenage mutants - grips like a vice.

Drawn in [Burns’] signature woodblock style, and [is] visually memorising

A bleak but brilliant tale of suburban alienation

Black Hole just might be the most perfect book going, if not the sexiest... As startling and evocative a work as the medium has ever produced.

Make no mistake: this is a bleak book that tries desperately in its final frames to introduce a note of optimism in resignation. It's also brilliant.

And you thought your adolescence was scary. 
 
Suburban Seattle, the mid-1970s. We learn from the outset that a strange plague has descended upon the area's teenagers, transmitted by sexual contact. The disease is manifested any number of ways - from the hideously grotesque to the subtle (and concealable) - but once you've got it, that's it. There's no turning back. 
 
As we inhabit the heads of several key characters - some kids who have it, some who don't, some who are about to get it - what unfolds isn't the expected battle to fight the plague, or bring heightened awareness of it, or even to treat it. What we become witness to instead is a fascinating and eerie portrait of the nature of high-school alienation itself - the savagery, the cruelty, the relentless anxiety and ennui, the longing for escape. 
 
And then the murders start. 
 
As hypnotically beautiful as it is horrifying (and, believe it or not, autobiographical), Black Hole transcends its genre by deftly exploring a specific American cultural moment in flux and the kids who are caught in it - back when it wasn't exactly cool to be a hippie any more, but Bowie was still just a little too weird. 
 
To say nothing of sprouting horns and moulting your skin . . .

Final Cut

Black Hole is best graphic novel of the year... One of the most stunning graphic novels yet published

Charles Burns' comics are fluid, smooth and as solidly built as a vintage TV set, but they shudder with the chill of the uncanny

The confidence with which Burns positions himself within the larger map of other writing and art is entirely earned

Sugar Skull is one of the most vividly drawn and painfully and honest expositions of male guilt I’ve ever read

Charles Burns grew up in Seattle in the 1970s. His work rose to prominence in Art Spiegelman's Raw magazine in the mid-1980s and took off from there, for an extraordinary range of comics and projects, from Iggy Pop album covers to the latest ad campaign for Altoids. In 1992 he designed the sets for Mark Morris's delightful restaging of The Nutcracker. He's illustrated covers for Time, the New Yorker and the New York Times Sunday Magazine. He is the official cover artist for The Believer magazine. Black Hole received Eisner, Harvey and Ignatz awards in 2005. Burns lives in Philadelphia with his wife and two daughters.

The beloved and award-winning author of Black Hole returns with an arresting story of an artist's obsessions 
 
As a child, Brian and his friend Jimmy would make home movies in their yards, coaxing their friends into starring as victims of grisly murders and smearing lipstick on them to simulate blood. Now an aspiring filmmaker, he and Jimmy, along with Jimmy's friend Laurie – the new girl in town and Brian's reluctant muse – set off to a remote cabin in the woods. Armed with a thrifted 16-millimetre camera, they film a true sci-fi horror movie set in a post-apocalyptic world where humans are born of disembodied alien wombs, a homage to Brian's favourite movie The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. But as Brian's affections for Laurie go seemingly unreciprocated, Brian writes and draws himself into a fantasy where she is the girl of his dreams – somehow both his damsel in distress and his saviour. 
 
The beloved and award-winning Charles Burns returns with an arresting story of an artist's obsessions and the cost of pushing the boundaries of creativity in his first standalone work since Black Hole. Final Cut blurs the line between dreams and reality, imagination and perception in this astonishing look at what it truly means to express oneself through art.

Charles Burns

‘A sleazy, slow-burning, page-turning exploration of a midlife crisis…. He’s not a million miles off [a Noble Prize].’ 
Thomas W. Hodgkinson, a Spectator Book of the Year 
 
Charles Burns’ graphic trilogy has been hailed as one of the masterpieces of the form. Now readers can find the long strange trip of Doug in all its mind-bending, heartbreaking totality. The fragments of the past collide with the reality of the present, nightmarish dreams evolve into an even more dreadful reality, and when you finally find out where all of this has been going, and what it means ... it will make you go right back to the first page and read it all again with new eyes. Just like Doug.

Charles Burns

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